Tim Grobaty: Check out these titles from our Summer Reading List

BOOKS FOR THE BEACH: Next week we finally get to go on vacation, back to our summer cottage in San Clemente to hang out with the raccoons and skunks and wild dogs and homeless cats and feral tourists and Nixon's and Bebe Rebozo's ghosts.

Pretty much all we do is sit in the shade with our black socks and sandals and read. Because that's what people do on summer vacation. Especially people who don't read the rest of the year.

And what do they read? Generally what everybody else is reading. Last summer it was the "Twilight" books. Before that, "Dragoon Tattoo" books. This summer it'll be the "50 Shades" books. Don't be like everyone else. You're not 8 years old or some kind of weirdo. No, you're a person of taste, and that explains why each summer you come crawling to us, empty bookbag in hand, asking for our Summer Reading List.

There are two books at the top of our list that we really need you to read this summer. The remainder you should read if you have time, and you do, because it's summer.

"Canada," by Richard Ford. You won't find any better writing in a book released this year, or many other years, for that matter. The story isn't the point - Ford tells you on the first page what's going to happen - but the writing is so magnificent, it'll break your heart. It's a voice that the Pulitzer-winner Ford mastered early in his career, and he's polished it to perfection with "Canada."

"The Orphan Master's Son," by Adam Johnson. This novel is an utterly fascinating and sprawling yarn about a North Korean outcast who slowly, and without ambition, becomes a national hero and a pal of the explosive and mad Kim Jong Il. It's creepy, scary and wonderful all at once, and it's a spectacular look inside the workings of the weirdest country of them all.

"Beware of God: Stories," by Shalom Auslander. This one predates Auslander's 2012 book, "Hope: A Tragedy," but it's a lot funnier, with wildly irreverent stories with Our Maker (if we can all agree that Our Maker is the Jewish version) taking on such roles as a hit man, going after a guy who won't die as planned.

"The Whore of Akron: One Man's Search for the Soul of LeBron James," by Scott Raab. Raab, a longtime writer for Esquire, is a lifelong (and long- suffering) fan of Cleveland pro sports. This book is part wild memoir, but mostly a half-heartbroken, half-enraged study of how the homegrown ex-Cavalier James ruined Cleveland sports, and the author's life, when he left for Miami.

"The Beginner's Goodbye," by Anne Tyler. This makes the list by the fact that it's by Anne Tyler who we "discovered" in 1982 with her "Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant." We've read every one of her books since then, and she's never let us down. As always, the story is timeless and insular, unaffected by current events. As long as people continue to live lives of quiet desperation, there'll be fodder for Tyler.

"The Sisters Brothers," by Patrick deWitt. Why not a good old Western to kill some summertime hours? Charlie and Eli Sisters are on their ponies in the Oregon Territory in the mid-1800s on a killin' mission. The story mixes Cormac McCarthy's brutality with Charles Portis' ("True Grit") companionable humor.

The next three on our list haven't come out quite yet, but they are all scheduled for summer release, and we'll be reading them all - with varying degrees of skepticism.

"The Red House," by Mark Haddon. This novel, by the author of the wondrous "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time," comes out today. It sounds like a Christie-esque take on a story of a man who invites his sister's family to stay at his vacation home, as related from the perspectives of eight people.

"Lionel ASBO: The State of England," by Martin Amis. Who better to unleash on the celebrity culture crush than the barbaric social satirist (No. 1 on the list with the passing of Christopher Hitchens) Martin Amis? The novel, which comes out at the tail end of the season on Aug. 21, deals with the subject through the thuggish and suddenly wealthy lottery winner Lionel ASBO (for Anti-Social Behavior Orders). No one shall be spared.

"A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald," by Errol Morris. Oh, no, here we go again, with yet another rummaging through the weird and jumbled evidence surrounding the conviction of former Green Beret and St. Mary Medical Center trauma chief Jeffrey MacDonald for the 1970 slaying of his pregnant wife and two daughters. This time out, it's told by famed documentarian Errol Morris ("Thin Blue Line," "The Fog of War").